Mechanical Design of Compliant Microsystems—A Perspective and Prospects

The field of microsystems, or microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) as it is popularly known, is a truly multidisciplinary area of research. It combines a wide variety of physical, chemical, and biological phenomena into an integrated system on a chip. This unprecedented integration naturally calls for new systems design approaches as well as efficient ways to analyze a single system or a component that is governed by many types of partial and ordinary differential equations from different physical and chemical domains. The key component of almost all MEMS devices, with the exception of microfluidic systems, is a movable mechanical structure of micron dimensions. Since the early works in this area dating back to the late sixties of the 20th Century, simple mechanical structures such as beams and diaphragms have dominated MEMS. Thus, the mechanical design in MEMS is mainly concerned with the design of such elastically deforming structures subjected to a variety of forces ranging from electrostatic, thermal, magnetic, piezoelectric, radiation pressure, etc. In addition to these unconventional forces and the accompanying complex equations that govern them, micromachining brings additional difficulties in microsystem design.